Rails: Discarding Jobs

TIL the meaning of “discard” differs between ActiveJob and GoodJob.

I was trying to use after_discard callback to handle all other exceptions that are not retried. I assumed this would work because the GoodJob Dashboard was showing “Discarded” on jobs that raised errors.

BUT even though unhandled exceptions say “Discarded” in the GoodJob dashboard, they are not considered discarded by ActiveJob’s standard, which means they don’t trigger after_discard callbacks.

the interaction between Active Job and the Backend when exceptions are raised through the backend is very undefined.

“discard” is an explicit action to be taken in Active Job Active Job doesn’t define what a Backend should do when a job errors Good Job reuses the term “discard” to cover: using discard_on (event: discard.activejob) using retry_on when attempts: are exceeded (event: retry_stopped.active_job) implicitly when a job error and is not retried

— bensheldon bensheldon/good_job#844 (comment)

more stuff

Anyway, to actually use after_discard, I added

discard_on StandardError
retry_on *RETRYABLE_ERRORS

after_discard do |...|
  # cleanup affected records
end

(the order of these is important)

this addressed my use case, since I only want to retry a select number of exceptions and cleanup the affected records when any other exception is raised.